


When You Least Expected It, When You Least Wanted It, Love Came Knocking

by Quaxo



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Other, POV Second Person, soul mates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-18
Updated: 2014-02-18
Packaged: 2018-01-12 23:10:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1203991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quaxo/pseuds/Quaxo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony's pretty sure he's a 2-percenter -- part of the 2 percent of humanity that can't bond with another soul.  He's pretty sure he was better off that way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When You Least Expected It, When You Least Wanted It, Love Came Knocking

You wouldn't say that you've been searching for your soulmate forever -- because that stinks of desperation, and you don't do desperation, not even when you're buried in a cave in the middle of Fucking-Nowhere-Stan with a car battery strapped to your chest. To be unbonded in your 40s is pretty much a sign that there's no one out there waiting for you. You're one of the lucky 2 percent that can't bond at all. Not that it makes you a freak, everyone is always careful to add. You tell yourself its a good thing -- that you don't need a soul mate because you have friends and your work and you're fine just fine with not having someone hanging onto you -- holding you back. 

Doesn't mean that some nights -- especially after nights of meaningless sex with people you don't particularly like but were fun at the time -- you don't wonder what your life would be like with someone who could naturally see past your bullshit.

Progress marches on and so do you -- you show the world the first glimpse of sustainable, by-product free, limitless green energy when you light up the tower in New York. You and Pepper maybe have a thing -- it's terrible, but you hope she's like you, one of the 2-percenters. Pepper's willing to indulge in a casual relationship with you, she's lonely too, but you're always aware that she has an eye out, still searching for her other half with every new face that she meets. 

Then Agent Agent crashes the party, leaves you with a stack of homework, and steals your girl to boot. It's like being seventeen at MIT all over again. 

So over the course of the next couple of days you meet two aliens dressed in funny helmets and their mothers curtains claiming to be Gods with a capital G, a modern day Lazarus, one of the most brilliant minds of your generation, and you're even reunited with the Russian spy. Its pretty much a cluster fuck at first -- especially between you and True Blue -- but war makes strange bedfellows and you and RWB finally figure out how to work together. 

Once you've got the ship righted you come inside and Fury looks grim as fuck at you and Rogers and then he throws out a stack of blood-stained Captain America cards onto a glass table and tells you that Coulson's dead, stabbed through the chest, and that you and America's Greatest Hero have to get it together or else firey doom from above. 

You used to hang with comic book nerds and you can tell that those babies were near mint pre-blood soaking -- the centers are absolutely dead on, a rarity for CA cards. Absently you reach out and touch the blood --

It feels like that moment when you finally sees the utterly obvious answer to the glitch in the system. Everything seems so much clearer now. 

You've found your soul mate -- and isn't it just your luck that he's dead. Death by heroic yet futile act. Tragic.

He was like you -- and now you understand a bit better why a mere mortal might challenge a God. Being a 2-percenter made him careless -- it makes you careless. There's no one really waiting for you at home at the end of the day so who's to care if you act a little reckless with your life? If you don't make your death big and splashy then how will anyone remember your name after you're gone?

You leave the room, head down to the demolished cargo hold where your soul mate died. You can feel the tacky bits of blood on your fingertips, connecting you to him. Even if you had bonded, you're reasonably sure (99.999987% to be exact) that he'd still have tried to stop Loki. Still have died trying. Even you couldn't hold on that tight to his soul and prevent him from doing something stupidly heroic. Stupid heroics were in his nature.

You stare down at the dark stain that marks the place that Agent-Phil-Coulson-Agent, your soul mate, died. All you can think about is all the time you squandered -- dodging his calls, calling him names, being a general pain in the ass. There's a sort of comfort at least that you're pretty sure (50.0009% to be exact) that for all the shit you gave him he at least found you amusing. Maybe he'd have been willing to take a chance on you, despite all the aggravation you caused him. 

Your soul mate's been in your life all these years and you wasted them because people's hands are petri dishes and you're too afraid to touch them. Unforgivable on your part. How do you expect to find a soul mate if you won't touch their hands, get that necessary skin to skin contact -- Coulson didn't seem to be the type that would go for a tumble in the sack, which is strangely less abhorrent than shaking hands. If you dealt with it like a man then maybe you'd have had a small handful of good years together -- provided he didn't kick you to the curb, soul mate or not. 

Then Cap's at your shoulder talking about 'good soldiers' and you really really don't want to hear it, not while you've still got Agent-Phil-Agent's blood on your hands. You're not a soldier -- Agent-Phil-Agent was supposed to be so much more to you than a soldier. 

You don't have time to be thinking of this -- the world is going to end in a matter of hours in a way that would have made Orson Welles cackle with glee. You have to focus at the problem at hand now -- there will be a time to grieve later, if you're still alive.

You and the others get to work and gradually the blood is wiped from your hands and replaced with motor grease and metal shavings -- just in time to face off against flying alien whales and their riders. You fight to avenge a soul mate you barely knew, throwing yourself head first into the belly of the beast, with little regard to your own safety. 

Then you spot the nuke and really, its an easy decision to make --

After all, there's no one waiting for you to come home.


End file.
